


And Your Heart Beats From Within Me

by a_spark_of_light



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe, Hospitals, M/M, mythical creatures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-28
Updated: 2012-12-28
Packaged: 2017-11-22 18:42:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/612998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_spark_of_light/pseuds/a_spark_of_light
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Louis doesn’t make Harry’s condition worse. Everytime Louis visits it’s like Christmas in July. He makes Harry feel whole. And Harry would give anything to feel like that forever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And Your Heart Beats From Within Me

**Author's Note:**

> The ending (and really the whole story) is up to the readers interpretation. This is also posted up on my tumblr: swallowsandskateboards.

Feet drag clumsily across the ice. A slip. A fall. Long limbs sprawl across the cold ice. Pale hands push up, push him onto his feet. He stands. He walks. One foot in front of the other. He should be careful. He should take his time. He should…but he can’t.

He feels the heart, feels it beating dully within the confines of his chest. It pulses painfully, with clenching and releasing increasing force as he grows closer to the middle of the frozen over pond. The bitter air slices harshly at his cheeks, staining them a rosy red. It bites at his eyes, tears at his skin, trying to warn him away. The heart gives another clench. He’s close. He’s so close.

With a final clench, he’s there. His feet fall from beneath him, giving way to gravity, to the anxiety that holds him down. Fingers sweep across the surface, pushing over frost, pushing over newly fallen snow to reveal the glassy blue underneath. He peers in, his breath catching in his throat at what he sees.

Pale skin, white as a sheet, smooth and milky. Feathered hair wafted out in a halo around a head. Light brown lashes, thick and fanned brushing against the cheeks that frame a slightly elfin nose. Thin blue lips drawn into a smooth line. Beautiful. An image frozen in time.

His hand moves out to touch the boy below him, catching nothing but the cold, hard ice. The image in front of him blurs, the water pooling back behind his eyelids. The heart beat softens, the rhythmic clench and release begins to fade away. And the dams finally break, the small stream cascading across his cheeks, the frigid winds using them like ammo against him. It burns. It all burns.

“No,” he lets out in a hushed whisper. “No!”

Hands beat down on the ice below him, one heavy hit after another. Nails claw at the surface. The blood pools to the top of his skin, bruises in the making take their stay for where the will soon form. Relentless and numb, he hammers, immune to the pain that shakes its way up his arms.

“No!” He swings down. “No!” Another hit. “No!” A crack appears. “No!” The thin ice shatters.

His own heart races, blood pulsing through his veins mixed with streams of adrenaline. The water slaps at his skin, as the ice on which he lays begins to crack. He doesn’t notice, eyes trained on the body below him. The body that floats up. The body that reaches for him. The body that comes back to, not quite alive but not quite dead either, with its first gasp of breath. Eyes open and all he sees is blue. Icy blue.

His body freezes over, locked solid as the arms from below reach up, pulling him in. His limbs don’t fight it, submitting to the dark waters below him. His heart clatters in his chest, lungs grasping for air that isn’t there. He allows himself to be cradled by the cool body from below the surface, allows himself to be dragged in deeper and deeper. His lungs ache. His heart quivers. And with a final strain for breath, the water floods in, filling his lungs.

Everything goes black.

—————————————————————

A faint beeping strums out inside his ears. High pitched and repetitive. His throat burns dry, his body running empty. Everything aches and nothing is fine. His eyes feel as if they have thousand pound weights holding them down.

‘Harry? Wake up, love. Harry?’

The beeping picks up as he tries to move his hand in the direction of the noise. Nothing moves. Nothing works. His limbs feel as if they’ve left him to be attached to someone else’s body. The ones attached to him don’t feel like his own. His mind feels clouded, fogged over with grey. He blows though it, pushing it away, eyelids twitching. They twitch once, twice, before finally beginning to part.

The light above him is harsh and white. Unforgiving, burns into his eyes forcing them closed and begging for mercy. He waits a moment before opening them again, slower, allowing time for his senses to adjust.

‘Harry!’

He looks to his side and sees his mother. She looks tired and ragged, as if she’d been through hell and back and just stopped here to visit him on the journey home. He doesn’t expect he looks much better.

He means to ask where he is, how much time has passed since he last fell asleep, but all that comes out is a broken and cracked, “Mum?”

She lets out a sigh of relief, like she was scared that him waking up was all an illusion, a trick of her mind. She leans down, encircling his frail and fragile body into a warm hug. It’s full of love and everything he’d missed and leaves him feeling cold as she pulled away. But he always felt cold now, didn’t he? Cold and empty.

“I brought you tea,” she says, arms gesturing to the Styrofoam cup on the bedside table, “in case you woke. It’s gone cold now, but let’s say I get you another, alright.”

He nods weakly, hating how frail his body has become. He wants to scream, wants to shout, wants to tell her that she shouldn’t be doing this - that she shouldn’t have to do this. “Okay.” That’s all he says and yet it feels like he’s said so much more, by the way he’s lost his breath just from that one word. She brushes a hand, comforting and warm, across his cheek before she leaves. The area she touched burns red hot upon her exit.

“Thought she’d never go,” rings out a voice from his other side, the side closest to the window. It’s light, airy, and slightly raspy, every word trimmed with a note of condescending humor as if there was some joke that everyone who heard was left out on.

Muted feet make their way over to him, stopping in front of his bed. Harry looks up, gaze trailing up the lithe body, to a sharply framed face, and stopping at a pair of piercing blue eyes. The boy in front of his gives him a small smirk, one that could be tinged with humor or mirth – he could never figure out which one it was exactly. He feels exposed and raw, under the others gaze, practically positive that those blue eyes could see all of his secrets as clearly as day.

“Louis,” Harry whispers, the words falling longingly off his lips.

The boy, Louis, gives him a crooked grin before climbing up onto the bed, lying down next to Harry, bringing the taller boy into his embrace. A rough shiver racks its way down Harry’s spine, body fighting against the chill that Louis always seemed to exude. Despite it all, Harry burned warm inside, a fire lit within him the moment Louis chose to shower him with his attention.

“Miss me?” Louis asked, fingers stroking through wild chocolate curls.

“Mmhm.” Harry snuggled in closer to the other boy, breathing in his scent. Pine and clear waters. Louis always smelled like winter with a hint of something unidentifiable-something dark, though Harry never spent much time trying to pinpoint what that was.

“Had a nice sleep, Curly?” Louis asked before leaning in closer until his breath tickled at his ear, coming out like small puffs of December’s harsh winds. “Did you dream of me?”

The words traveled into his ears and through his body, tugging lightly at Harry’s heart. He had dreamt of Louis. No…more than that. He had been with Louis. He was always with Louis. Every time he closed his eyes the blue eyed boy was there waiting for him, waiting for when they could finally be together for real. When they could meet and Harry could be healthy and Louis could be whole. When Louis would be alive.

“I always dream of you, Lou,” Harry gathered, grasping for the words around him, saving them up. Each one made his chest ache a little more, rubbed his throat raw, and left him gasping for breath. But Louis…Louis was worth it. He was worth the pain. Even more, Louis made a little bit of the pain go away. “Sometimes…I even dream that I don’t wake up just so I could dream forever.”

He feels the low rumble of laughter against his back but never hears them, only feels the cool lips brushing over the back of his ear, laying a burning kiss against his skin. “‘Course you do, Haz. Sometimes I dream that you don’t wake up either.”

They lie there like that for a few more minutes, Louis whispering softly in his ear, words smooth, silky, and foreign. Harry doesn’t understand any of it, basking in the sound of Louis voice and the chill of his embrace. But like every time, life comes in the way, his mother’s footsteps thudding lightly in his head, voice tinged with sadness as she talks to the parent of another patient.

“That’s my cue to leave,” Louis says, moving in to drop a gentle kiss against Harry’s own chapped lips, so quick that it may have just been a figment of his imagination, before he’s off, gone just as Harry’s mother walks through the door.

“I didn’t know which kind you wanted since they were all out of your favorite, so I just brought you both of what they had down-” His mother’s voice cuts off as her eyes land on him, painted with concern as she rushed to him. “Harry dear, you’re shivering like it’s you’ve just seen death. Why didn’t you as for another blanket?” She picks another one up off the end of the bed, putting it over top of the first two that already bury him. “Of course you’re cold,” she says. “Your window’s been opened again. That nurse should know better than to try and let fresh air in that way.”

She closes it before making her way over to him with the first cup of tea, blowing it lightly before moving it up to his lips. “Drink up, Hun.”

2 hours later his doctors come in. The first, a silver fox with eyes that crinkle when he smiles like Louis’s. Harry likes this doctor, even if he delivers more bad news than good. The other is a man who did not age as well, skin sagging and smile overly genuine. He makes Harry tell him about his dreams, about Louis. He takes Louis away from him, makes him less of a secret. He never patronizes Harry because he has Louis. No. He does something even worse. He questions whether or not Louis is real.

“Another visit from Louis today, Mr. Styles?” his second doctor, Dr. Eckles, asks him. It’s a rhetorical question, but Harry answers anyways.

“Yes.”

“Do you ever notice that whenever Louis visits your condition gets worse?”

“No.” Harry coughs, the sound of it old and dry. “My condition gets worse and then Louis visits me. He makes it better.”

“Better?” Dr. Eckles leans in, eyes intrigued as always, as if everything that Harry tells him becomes more interesting as he goes on. But Harry isn’t interesting. Louis is interesting. Everything about Louis is interesting. “How so?”

“He makes me feel warm…like summer…but Louis-Louis is winter and summer and Christmas in July all at the same time. He…he just makes everything okay again.” He can’t explain it, can’t explain the effect Louis has on him. “It sounds really strange, but…when I’m with him…I feel whole. I want to feel like that forever.”

“And how do you feel now when Louis is away?”

“Like I’m running on empty,” Harry answers honestly, eyes slowly beginning to close. He’s tired, really tired. It’s time to sleep. “But it’s okay…’cuz…I’ll see him soon…real soon.” His tongue is heavy in his mouth, each word fighting to pass through his lips. “He’s…waiting…for me…”

The beep from his heart monitor lulls him to sleep.

—————————————————————

The cool water rushes over his head, pulling him further and further under the current. He no longer breathes, his heart no longer beats for it is no longer his own. It belongs to Louis. Louis who pulls him back to the surface, back to life, forcing the water out of his lungs until he breathes again. As if he’d never even fallen under in the first place.

He feels his heart beat inside Louis chest, thundering within the confines of the other boy’s small frame. His hand reaches out, settling over the heart above him, feeling it calm to a steady beat. He looks up, his eyes meeting an icy blue pair clouded with tears.

“Lou,” he rasps out, spare hand brushing tears off of frozen porcelain cheeks.

“Haz.”

The name rushes over him a like a breath of fresh air and the heart quivering beneath his touch.


End file.
